Quotes About Self-doubt

All of my close friends are emotional train wrecks. This is what makes our lives interesting - constantly doubting ourselves, worrying, wondering if we've made a mistake. Could we have done better? Are we good people? Are we bad people?

I would be a nervous wreck on a date, which sounds crazy because I'm a confident woman but I wouldn't know what to do myself.

As good as I was at wrestling, I never thought I was any good.

I quit wrestling in 2006 because I just got lost. My mom didn't want me wrestling. I was wondering if I was going to make it in wrestling; I got injured in a match. I was 19. I was away from home, living in Florida, and I just got lost. I couldn't face it, so I stepped away.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

When I - when I was going to school, I knew how to read, write, add and subtract and I - I basically said, 'What else do I need? I'm never going to be able to go to college. I'm not going to be able to afford to go to college. I'm not going to be able to get a scholarship.'

Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the 'I'm a Fraud' phase. You go through the 'I'll Never Finish' phase. And every once in a while you think, 'What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it's received as such?'

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer's block... Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can't get it out, I start feeling bad about myself - a lot of self-loathing.

I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.

I'm fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don't have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with 'It's a masterpiece,' and then tell me what you think could be changed.

Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.

I'm a lousy writer, and it shows when I try to write poetry.

It took me ten minutes to write this very sentence. I'm no writer. This is not my calling.

I never thought of myself as a writer.

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.

An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.

A lot of writers whom I love, admire and call friends share this feeling, which is this fundamental idea that we're frauds. That we will be pushed out on to the stage, and it will be revealed that the emperor has no clothes.

I'm hugely affected by what people think. It could be a million people saying, 'Great.' And then one person writes, 'What the hell is this kid doing?' and starts slagging me off, for some reason, and then I have to join in the blog and sign in under a different name and go,'Why don't you like him?'

I would leave me were I him. I would leave myself if I could.

She looked as if she'd swallowed an assortment of her own hangnails.

But he found himself rounding syllables like stones in his mouth, silently. He knew he was shy, and thought to be stupid; he was beginning to suspect, thought, that he wasn't stupid. Perhaps not even slow. Merely uneducated. But not, he hoped, uneducable.

I didn't want to be like the novelist who spent so much time rewriting his first sentence that he never wrote his second.

I'm the sort of man who's doomed to be a failure and I'll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel!